The above two-minute piece of music was inspired by the 5000th Martian sunrise as captured by NASA’s Opportunity rover. Called “Mars soundscapes”, it was created by Domenico Vicinanza University, Genevieve Williams of the University of Exeter and colleagues by the sonification of an image of the rising Sun taken by Opportunity. The piece will be premiered on 13 November at the NASA booth at the Supercomputing Conference SC18 in Dallas, Texas.
The UK-based organization Sense about Science describes itself as “an independent campaigning charity that challenges the misrepresentation of science and evidence in public life”. It has just released a new report in association with SAGE Publishing called Equipped to Decide. It looks at how, as a society, we collect large amounts of data, but do not always make the best use out of it. Solutions suggested in the report include using artificial intelligence to mine this data for relevant information.
Finally, a few weeks ago we mentioned that Stephen Hawking’s relatives were auctioning some of the cosmologist’s possessions after his death earlier this year. The sale was yesterday and big ticket items included a copy of Hawking’s PhD thesis, which went for a whopping £584,750 and a motorized wheelchair he used in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which bagged £296,750 – the same price as a collection of Hawking’s medals and awards.
